Data is often collected, organized, and indexed for many transactions and communications that occur in today's global economy. This information has become vital to enterprises and individuals. Consequently, a variety of techniques for securing, backing up, and replicating information exists in the industry.
A data replication concern is ensuring that information is available should a central source fail or become unavailable for a variety of other reasons, such as planned power outages, network upgrades, and software upgrades. If data replication is properly done, services and users can still seamlessly access the remote data source with uninterrupted service if a master data source is unavailable. Thus not only is information secured and backed up, information is also intended to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.
Known data replication techniques, such as DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device), offer only a two node active-active configuration, and do not provide a solution beyond two nodes.